


Counting Heartbeats

by Debate



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/F, Family Fluff, Fix-It, Girl!Monty, Post-Episode: s05e13 Damocles Part 2, Spacekru are there in spirit, mystical elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 13:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18700564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Debate/pseuds/Debate
Summary: Mon and Harper have decided to spend the next ten years to themselves in the peace of space. They love each other, but they miss their old family, and as if in recognition of that a third member of their family quite literally appears out of nowhere. Of course they love him anyway.





	Counting Heartbeats

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Final Round of the 100 Chopped Challenge we had to include the tropes of:  
> 1) genderbend  
> 2) interrupted kiss  
> 3) conflicting stories  
> 4) solving a mystery  
> 5) sharing something (in this case a bed)  
> 6) free choice! - adoption fic in this case, with a mystical twist
> 
> Enjoy and make sure to check out the rest of the fics!

At the start they agree not to count the days (‘time violation’ Harper jokes, but something about it falls a bit flat) and they don’t need to. Harper has Mon and Mon has Harper and they both have an entire new ship to explore, much bigger than the Ring. 

It’s all business at first, setting up the new algae farm, learning the mechanics and abilities of the ship, picking their room. And it’s fun, oddly, despite the view of the roasting Earth. 

After all the chores are addressed they pick through the ship room-by-room, hand-in-hand. The guards’ quarters are the most interesting, even if they sting just a little of death. Books dogeared and never to be finished, photos from an Earth Harper never knew, containing smiles of people long dead, folded and often looked at. 

Some items are not so stained by sorrow though. A denim jacket covered in shining pins, a soccer ball abandoned in one hallway, a stuffed rabbit carefully hidden from judgemental coworkers under a mattress. There are secret rations too, jellybeans and vodka and coffee grounds, which Harper only ever had at Mount Weather. They save them all for special occasions.

They come across a deck of cards at some point, and after six years of learning every game in the book they’re something of experts. No words need to be spoken before they strike up a game, although Mon does feel it necessary to smile coyly when she catches Harper studying her nimble fingers as she shuffles. 

The air of flirtation seems to dissipate once the cards are in hand however, the emptiness of the room calling out to her instead. What was the point of a card game without Echo’s stone poker face? Without Raven’s unnecessary level of competition? Without Murphy and Emori’s increasingly elaborate cheating schemes?

“Go fish,” Mon says, but Harper lays down her whole hand and Mon folds a second later. “What’s wrong?”

Harper scooches over to let her head rest on Mon’s shoulder, counts her breathes to keep them even. Her exhales seem to rattle, their vibration only seeming to ease as Mon rubs circles into her back. 

Space, despite the assertions of all the books Harper had been made to consult as a kid, is not silent. Space stations certainly aren’t, not with the constant hum of electricity and the soft cycling of man-made air. Even the dark vacuum is not truly empty, if her friends are to be believed. Emori had insisted that her heart had never rang so loud in her ears than during her first space walk, and Mon and Raven had conferred. 

Harper has always liked that thought. That wherever people go they bring their heartbeats with them, and all the emotions contained therein. 

Still, it’s easy to acclimate to the new rumble of the Eligius engine, which at first had seemed so different from the Ark’s. It rocks her to sleep now. Despite the reservations that had lingered and tickled in the corners of her mind it’s been easy to adjust to the beat of two hearts instead of seven as well. 

“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” she asks of Mon. It’s not too late for them to go to sleep, she’s only five months older. “I like the peace, but I miss the others too.” 

“Me too,” Mon says, letting her hand press soothing circles against Harper’s shoulder. “But they’re still here with us.” 

Harper closes her eyes, her ear pressed to Mon’s shoulder, the steady thud in her throat making her linger on that idea. Not two heartbeats, but four hundred and seventeen. 

“I guess we aren’t really wanting for company, huh?” Harper muses, her voice thick with sleep. Mon kisses her forehead. 

“Not as long as I have you.”

It’s a nice affirmation, and most of the time Harper doesn’t doubt their decision. It reminds her of the first time she had kissed Mon, even while ALIE still danced on the peripheries. That feeling of finally achieving safety; fear gone. It had been like that on the Ring too, after those first few months of burnt fingers and grief and shadows. The Eligius ship provides them calm, room to breathe, happiness. 

And if the loneliness nips at their heels from time to time, there are other means of entertainment. They monitor Earth’s vital signs and finally get around to all those movies Murphy was always making off-hand references to. It’s Mon’s idea to start a video log, and even if it’s one sided it still feels like a conversation between them and their family; it eases the burden. 

And they have a lot of sex. Because Harper could never feel alone while wrapped in Mon’s arms. 

It’s at one such time when the semi-silence of space is first broken with a sob. Harper thinks it’s Mon at first, who has had erratic nightmares for as long as they’ve shared a bed, but as she blinks to full consciousness, she realizes no. It’s far too shrill for a full grown woman, and Mon is sitting up in bed too, brow worried. 

“You hear that too?” She asks, already moving to tug on her shirt. Harper is quick to follow. 

“Well there’s no way we’re having the same hallucination, right?” 

Mon nods, distracted as she opens the door and they sneak their way down the hall towards the cries. 

It’s a baby boy, naked on his back in one of the airlocks, his little face red from the effort of his cries. 

“Oh my God,” Harper says, clutching onto Mon’s arm as she finagles the door on their side to open. The catch releases with a pressurized hiss and both of them rush to the kid, hovering for a moment over his squirming form before Harper reaches down and picks him up with uncertain hands. “Shh,” she encourages, trying, and no doubt failing, to replicate the gentle bounce mothers have in their stances. 

The baby quiets after a few moments, only a hitch in his breath every so often. Can babies get hiccups? Harper rubs his back from where it was cold from the metal and wipes away a dribble of snot coming from his nose. 

“Where did he come from?” Mon asks, tracing the back of one tiny hand. Awe is clear on her face, but so are fear and uncertainty. 

“I have no clue,” Harper murmurs, careful to keep her voice low. The baby can’t be even a year old. If by some strange happenstance, he was the child of one of the Eligius members he couldn’t have survived the near year everyone’s been in cryosleep by himself. Not to mention Harper and Mon would have found him long before now. 

He opens his eyes then, wide and brown and too big for his face. Harper settles him closer against her chest, triple checks to make sure his head is supported. “All I know is that we have to keep him safe.” 

That’s easier said than done of course. The Eligius medbay has information about childbirth, but nothing on child rearing. Harper and Mon debate back and forth about whether he’ll be able to eat the algae. Until they realize there aren’t any other food options and spoon feed him the most watered-down batch possible. He doesn’t throw it up, and that at least is one victory in what will be a long line of defeats. 

Somehow it slips both their minds that at some point the kid would need to pass what he had consumed, leaving quite the mess, literally, on their hands. They clean up and Harper spends the rest of the day cutting up fabric to fashion into diapers and desperately wishing that Bellamy were awake. 

When it’s time to sleep they set him down in a makeshift crib, just a mat they surround by rolled up blankets so he won’t roll off, and neither Mon or Harper are able to get into their own bed until they watch the steady rise and fall of his chest. 

“He’s real precious, huh?” Mon says, and Harper is struck by the brilliance of her smile, how wide it is. 

“Yeah,” Harper says, afraid to bring up an idea that’s been sitting in her since Raven announced they would be stuck in space indefinitely, an idea that never really seemed possible till this moment. But she’s holding Mon’s hand, and that’s always made her braver. “Does this make us parents?” 

Another smile twitches on Mon’s face, more telling than her verbal answer. “Do you want that?” 

“I don’t know if we have a choice, but yeah,” Harper admits. “I’ve wanted it for a while, but it was never really possible, or safe. But he’s just been dropped in our laps. That’s a sign if I’ve ever seen one.” 

“Speaking of that, do you think we should be more concerned about how a baby showed up in the middle of space?” 

They settle in their own bed, Harper’s arm a cushion for Mon’s head, her fingers carding through her hair. It would need a cut soon, unless she decided she wanted to grow it long again. 

“Does it matter?” 

“I mean,” Mon starts, wrapping one arm around Harper’s waist. “If he’s...our son then one day he’ll wonder where he came from. Won’t we owe him an answer?” 

Harper doesn’t know. Adoption was an outdated concept on the Ark, gay and lesbian couples had the option of donors or surrogacy, but the idea of raising an unrelated family member was left on the ground. Harper has never had to think over the nuances of the institution. 

But Mon’s right, once he’s old enough to realize he’s not biologically related to him, there are bound to be questions. Ones that should have answers. “Okay,” Harper agrees. “We’ll start looking into it tomorrow.” 

Tomorrow takes much longer to come than Harper would have ever anticipated, three times during the night she’s woken up by the baby’s cries. The first time another feeding of algae is enough to settle him back down, and the second time simply holding him till he drifts back to sleep is enough, but the third time he seems insistent on fussing, and nothing will calm him. She and Mon are exhausted when the ship’s lights click back on. 

The exhaustion and their chores distract from any avenue of investigation they might have sought to explore about their son’s mysterious appearance. Their son. Harper gets a thrill every time she thinks that during the day. 

“We didn’t really get much done today, huh?” Mon says as they prepare for bed. 

“Tomorrow will be better,” Harper says, double-checking on the baby before snuggling up to Mon. “I think we should make a new video tomorrow, to tell the others about this new development.”

Mon considers that for longer than Harper thinks is necessary. “We should probably name him first, don’t you think?” 

“Oh, right. Well, something better and more important than Montgomery.” 

“You know it’s a family name,” Mon huffs, but listens attentively as Harper spits out some suggestions. Mon’s mouth quirks at each recommendation and Harper has to admit that all of them taste off in her mouth. “Yeah, I don’t really like any of those either.” 

“I…” Mon presses her lips together. “What about Jordan?” 

It’s been more than seven years since Jasper died, but Harper knows the memory still pricks for Mon. It does for Harper too. She misses her friend, and his letter and its contents, received six years after the initial blow hadn’t done anything to soothe the grief. Now, seven years later, what they’re doing now makes the memory sit different. 

“He’s the light at the end of our tunnel,” Harper suggests against the shell of Mon’s ear. There’s a hiccoughing breath and then the smell of tears, and Harper holds her love a little tighter. “Jordan McIntyre Green. That’s our son.” 

And he is their son, no matter the odd circumstances of his birth (appearance? blessing?). Hardly any time pass before Harper feels like a mother, like the beating of Jordan’s heart is essential to her own. But as those feelings intensify so does the fear that he’ll disappear as mysteriously as he came. 

Except they can’t seem to figure out how he came to be. Their only lead is the video footage of the airlock, but it’s unhelpful. The tape displays an empty airlock all day on May 9th, at midnight there’s an odd discoloration in the room, a blip in the camera maybe, but it looks to Harper like the room was briefly filled with smoke or mist. But if it is an aberration it’s one that abates completely within five minutes to reveal Jordan on the floor. 

Mon agrees that it’s an odd facet of the video, the kind of mystery that would have Raven climbing in the ducts for weeks searching for an explanation all while Murphy hypothesized about an alien doom. That thought sends a drop of fear in her belly. 

“Oh Mon, what if he’s some sort of alien? Or AI hallucination? Or—”

“Hey, take a deep breath,” Mon says. “You’re spiraling.” 

She does, and feels better for it. But not totally convinced. She tastes tears in the corners of her mouth. “What if we’re really just losing our minds?” Harper has spent time in the Eligius medical center, she’s been reading about common childhood diseases, about genetic disorders, about the effects of trauma and loneliness on the psyche. When she was seventeen she coped with the mess of her emotions by drinking, what if this is her mind’s new way of coping?

It would work. Nothing has ever made her happier than Jordan, not even Mon. 

“Hey,” Mon says, one hand on her cheek stroking away the drying lines of shed tears. It feels real. She hands over their son who had been sleeping sound in her grip, his downy lashes pressed gently closed. He feels real. Harper cradles him closer, Mon takes her hand, overlaying their fingers. “Feel this.” 

Jordan’s chest is only as wide as the length of their hands, but under her palm Harper can feel his sleepy, steady heartbeat. 

“See?” Mon says as they stand huddled around their son. “Where he came from might be important, but not as important as the fact that he’s here now. And that he’s real.”

Jordan yawns, his tiny hand, somehow already so strong, curling inward on the edge of blanket in his grip. 

“He’s real,” Harper says out loud to herself. She turns the sentence over in her head, lets it settle in her sternum. The last of her doubt trickles out with her tears. “I love you.” She kisses Jordan’s wispy hair. “I love you.” She kisses Mon’s sweet lips. 

Maybe it’s that shift in mentality that finally scares off the loneliness, or it might just be the occupation. Being mothers is a lot of work, each benchmark of growth Jordan passes revealing new challenges and problems to solve, not to mention the fact that she and Mon have to become climatologists and planetary scientists as they monitor Earth’s regrowth. And in all their free time they search for explanations for Jordan’s appearance, each new theory more outlandish than the last.

It gets to be Jordan’s third birthday, and they still have no explanation, but now Harper recognizes that that possibility doesn’t scare her. Their family is strong. It might be another six years before it’s whole again, but there’s a beauty in the wait. 

They each get two jelly beans for the special occasion. They’re more like hard candy at this point, but they’re still sweet and Jordan’s face lights up when he eats them. 

“More!” He demands with a grabby motion. 

“There is no more,” Mon lies, settling Jordan on her hip. He’ll be having more birthdays before they make it back down to the ground where they can grow food other than algae and it’s nice to be able to make the day special. Jordan pouts, and Harper senses a tantrum on the horizon so she jumps in with a distraction. 

“It’s time for the star show, wanna go watch?” 

Jordan perks up and Harper is grateful for the coincidence of the meteor shower falling on his birthday. The three of them move to stand in front of the observation window Harper settling her chin on top of Mon’s shoulder, arms encircling her waist and fingers tickling the bottom of Jordan’s bare foot. He squirms. 

“What are you trying at?” Mon questions. “We’re trying to get him to sit still.” 

“Earth!” Jordan interrupts, engaging in his new favorite hobby of identifying all the words he’s learning. “Earth! Earth!” 

“I know baby,” Harper says off hand as she focuses on Mon. “The running around is good for us. Besides one day he won’t let me tickle him, better to enjoy it while it lasts.” 

“He’s three!” Mon insists, always one to offer perspective. “We have quite a few years before that happens.”

“I know, but he’s already three, it feels like just yesterday he was...magically appearing in a cloud of fog on the airship.” 

“Look Earth!” 

Mon laughs, readjusting her grip around Jordan. “The best three years,” she says to Harper, who has to agree. She tilts her head for a kiss, but before her lips can connect with Mon’s Jordan interrupts, tugging on a fistful of Mon’s hair. 

“Ma, look! Green!” He’s pointing out to the observation window, more excited than he even was at the taste of the jellybeans. Mon starts into an explanation on why hair pulling is mean, but Harper cuts her off when she sees what Jordan means. 

There’s a spot of green in South America, in what used to be the Amazon forest. Smaller than Eden was, and the same pale shade of watered down algae that they feed Jordan, but still a spot of green. 

“Oh my god,” Mon says. “Good eye, baby.” 

Jordan struggles more, until Mon relents and puts him down after which he promptly waddles to stand in front of the window, just tall enough to see out of it. His nose pressed to the glass. 

“Pretty stars,” he says with the tone of wonder only children can have, and it’s then that Harper sees the first streak of light across the sky. 

“Now I don’t even need to wish for anything,” Harper says as she entwines her fingers with Mon’s, leading her so they stand next to their son. “Earth is coming back.”

It had been an unspoken worry they both shared as one year passed and then another and another without any visible indication that Earth was making a recovery. The radiation levels had been steadily dropping worldwide except in the area of the Damocles event, but there hasn’t been any signs of life. Until now. 

“What a great birthday present, huh?” Mon says, then leans down to blow a raspberry into Jordan’s cheek, an action met with squeals of laughter. 

Falling stars streak across Earth’s atmosphere, the greatest light show Harper has ever seen. Jordan’s fingers tap at the glass in rhythm to their illumination, a piano prodigy in another life.

“Good job,” he says, and Harper isn’t sure if it’s a question or a statement, either to himself or them, so she lets the words hang around them as they all stand in rapture to the majesty of Earth and space. 

The Earth gets better slowly, healing like a person would. Jordan seems to grow much faster, inches added almost every time Harper turns around. First he’s insisting on picking out his own room to sleep in, and then he needs his first haircut and all of a sudden he’s reading all by himself. The years pass in flashes of laughter and smiles. Tears, too, but not the kind that sting. 

Mon starts crying one day, after an afternoon spent in the cryosleep hall. 

“I was telling him about Bellamy and Octavia, talking about siblings,” she explains to Harper in their bed that night. “And he asked if he’d ever get one.” 

“Well when they wake up he and Madi will be almost the same age. And I doubt Bellamy and Echo will waste any time having a kid once there’s peace,” Harper says. She’s always wanted Jordan to have someone his age to play with, hearing that he wants that too makes her heart squeeze. He’s been much more snappy recently, rebellious in his quiet, pouty way, asking for stories about Murphy. 

“I know,” Mon says, “But I was thinking, we couldn’t have another kid obviously, not one with our blood anyway. And then I thought, doesn’t Jordan look so much like us?” 

Harper filters Mon’s words for a minute, but soon falls into her line of thinking. For someone genetically unrelated to them, Jordan shares an uncanny resemblance to the two of them. It was such a basic assumption, of course their son would look like them that Harper hasn’t so much as considered it before now. 

“He does,” Harper says, fingers tracing the shape of Mon’s jaw which she shares with their son. “Another mystery.”

“Another miracle.” The tears had abated several minutes ago, but Harper is glad to know they were happy ones. Mon falls asleep soon after that, emotionally tired from the end of her day, but Harper remains awake for longer pondering once again how her son came into her life. 

Over the years the question had fallen to the backburner, progressively less important as their lives as parents became more established. But in the minutes before she falls asleep the curiosity burns more fully. 

An answer comes unexpectedly when she wakes. 

There’s careful nudging of her shoulder, and when her eyes blink open Jordan stand next to their bed, his rabbit clutched in one hand as he uses the other to shake her shoulder. 

“Mom,” he says in an exaggerated whisper. “I have a tummy ache.” 

“Oh, baby,” she says, getting out of bed and laying a hand on Mon’s shoulder as she shifts to let her know she can stay. “You want some medicine?” She asks as they sneak into the corridor and walk with slow steps to the med bay. 

Jordan doesn’t answer, pouting as they walk, and Harper rubs his back slowly. He had gone through a few bouts of the flu when he was younger, but by now his immune system was accustomed to all the germs aboard the ship. It was more likely that his stomach ache was a symptom of a different ail, and his refusal to take the medicine was indicative of that.

“Honey you have to take it if you want to feel better,” she insists nethertheless as they sit in medical, a spoon hovering in front of Jordan’s mouth. 

“I’m not sick,” he finally relents, hugging his rabbit closer, knees curling towards his chest. “I had a dream.” 

Harper sets the spoon down and sits down next to him, arm around his shoulders as he tucks himself against her side. “A bad dream? Do you wanna talk about it?”

Jordan shakes his head with vigour. “I don’t remember.” 

Harper hums, unable to determine if she believes him, but deciding not to push him either way. She simply strokes his arm until Jordan asks out of the blue, 

“Mom, where did I come from?” 

It takes quite a lot of effort for Harper to not stumble in her ministrations. She has never wanted to explain the concept of sex and conception to a child, but at this moment she would rather do it ten times over than have to admit that she doesn’t know. 

So she makes up a story. 

“Well about a year after me and your mum started living here, we started feeling a little lonely without the company of our family. We were happy to be with each other and have safety and peace but our world was a little emptier. And one day there was a shooting star, like the ones on your third birthday, you probably don’t remember. But that was you coming to join us, to complete our family. Our little shooting star.” 

Jordan’s brow furrowed in confusion. 

“Huh. Mum said that you raised me for one of the Eligius people.” 

Harper has a moment of panic, and wishes for a moment that she could lie on her feet like Emori or Echo. 

“But I think you’re both being tricky. Like Auntie Echo.” 

He shifts out of Harper’s grip and for a moment she thinks that he’s going to go back to bed confused and angry but he stays put, just out of reach. 

“Because my dream was of the mist of Earth that brought me here.” 

“The what?” Harper questions, the words sounds childish and mystical but something about them strikes as true and important. 

“There was fog in my dream and I was lost in it, but it had a deep voice and told me where to go. And it said that I had to come to the ship to be with my family because we’d be able to make the Earth healthy again.” 

“Yeah,” Harper says after a held moment of thought. Their son is a manifestation of their love of Earth and of each other. Maybe exhaustion is what allows that to make sense, but the explanation rests easy in her, fitting and satisfying. She rests her hand on Jordan’s shoulder, then shifts to rest against his chest over where his heart beats, and he’s as corporeal as he’s always been. As magical too. “But you know that me and your mum love you so much, right? You’re our boy.” 

He thinks very seriously for a moment. “I love you too,” he gives her cheek a sloppy kiss. “Bedtime now?” 

“Yeah,” Harper agrees taking his hand, but when they turn to leave they find mind Mon standing in the doorway. She doesn’t say anything, just smiles at Harper to show that she’s heard and is at peace. 

“The weirdest things happen to us, huh?” She whispers as they make their way down the hallway. Their lives have been a mess of odd events, cycles of violence, but this otherworldly coincidence seems the most real. The most important. 

“Maybe it’s unusual, but it feels right,” Harper says, stopping outside Jordan’s door, but he’s reluctant to enter. He clutches her hand tighter. 

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” He asks, almost shy. 

“‘Course,” Mon says, and they continue further the hall, past the cryo-chambers, where Jordan calls out goodnight to all their friends. 

The three of them climb into bed together, it’s a little narrow, but not if they cuddle. And with his eyes closed, rabbit held close, cushioned between the two of them, Jordan smiles. His breaths even out a moment later. 

Over his head Mon and Harper smile at each other. In four months their family will wake up and devise a plan to make new lives for themselves on a new patch of the Earth. And the part of Earth Mon and Harper have raised together in space will meet the part they’ve nurtured to regrow. A breath of fresh air for the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Might come back and edit this a bit more once the challenge is over, but I hope you enjoyed! If you're like me you really miss Monty and Harper with the start of the new season, and I loved writing them, tell me what you thought below!


End file.
